Research

DELEGATION AND INFORMATION transfer IN policy implementation NETWORKS

Documents establishing public and private regulatory systems are reviewed to identify all principal-agent (delegatory) relationships, as well as reporting requirements (information transfer). Policy implementation networks are compared by both sequential (the telephone game) and parallel (too many cooks in the kitchen) complexity.

SOCIAL DISTANCING effects IN local and GLOBAL MARKETS

Issue-relevant print media are automatically scanned for terms associated with 25+ conceptual categories (both English and Spanish-language). The proportional salience of terms for each category is compared across media segments, demonstrating strong "signal attenuation" of multiple categories by geographical and epistemic (expertise) distance.

eNVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL LABELING — MARKET-DRIVEN PUBLIC POLICY

In-depth study of a range of global, national and local non-state regulatory systems, including multi-stakeholder stewardship standards, accreditation and certification systems, chain-of-custody tracking, and process-based approaches. Emphasis on environmental, social and economic factors in sustainable forest management.

COMPARATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL ANDNATURAL RESOURCE POLICY

Global study of environmental and natural resource policies, especially varying models of stakeholder participation, and their roles in monitoring and the generation of baseline environmental knowledge. Emphasis on contexts with weaker institutional capacity, including neoliberal regimes, developing countries, and private regulatory approaches.

Modeling Integrated Environmental, Social and Economic Systems

Dynamic simulation designed to broadly encompass economic, ecological, and social characteristics of tourism development on the Commonwealth of Dominica. Combines econometric statistics, ecological theory, and social cohesion dynamics to recognize positive and negative impacts of tourism on local wellbeing.

semi-automated EXTRACTIon of real-world SOCIAL STRUCTUREs FROM online CONTENT

Entity names are identified from phrase concordances of online content pertaining to a given subject. Sociomatrices are generated based on co-occurrence of entity names at the document, paragraph or sentence level and mapped as network diagrams. Results compare favorably with manual methods of mapping the social networks.

EVOLUTION OF LEGAL DOCTRINE ACROSS FEDERAL APPELLATE COURTS

Federal court decisions relevant to an emergent legal doctrine (regulatory takings) are analyzed for citations to prior opinions (based on the legal principle of stare decisis), to compare expectations of de jure authority with evidence of emergent, de facto authority within specific US Circuit courts.